Ken Thompson Quotes

Part of keeping space open is not to try to choose a form - to spend more time thinking about content, and let form take care of itself.

I'd be fine if there weren't film festivals, and you just made your films and didn't have to do anything from that point on. That would be really great, wouldn't it? I don't know. I'm in kind of an aloof time, where I'm not taking anything too seriously.

Creativity is often blocked by trying to be perfect. Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

The actor shouldn't edit themselves or be anxious. And the actors that I admire are always the ones who are inventive and their imaginative life in free-willing. It's a director's job to go, "No here, don't do that, go there."

The worst thing you can do to anybody trying to be creative is to demand participation in their vision.

Sometimes I have good ideas. I love that part of our job. It's a constant process of searching, of exploring stuff, and realizing things. You can be in the middle of the film and it's like, "Oh my God! I think we need to do this! Maybe in this scene she should shave her head!"

I've changed the way I look at things. When I put out a record or single I don't allow myself to set up expectations like, "This song must be a number one hit. Its got to sell X amount of records." I have fallen into that trap before.

I love when people will say, "Oh, my songs are my children." I understand that, but I'm also not afraid to kill my kids. I know when the time has come to throw it in the trash can. With a child you've got to go to therapy and put it in daycare and buy it birthday presents. With a song, you can shove it in a dark closet and tell it you'll be there when you're ready.

Painting is a state of being.

The show, like everything we have done and still do, is just one more experiment.

What has reason to do with the art of painting?

Stop this agony of wishing Play it out Don't think, don't hesitate Curving back within yourself Just create... Just create

I worked at Disney many years ago. They just let me sit in a room for a couple of years and draw whatever I wanted to draw, so it's a very personal thing to me. Drawing and everything you do there is something meaningful and personal.

You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation.

I prefer to write and draw in the privacy of my home and with total freedom and then take it to the lion's den.

I start writing, pull whatever images happen to occur to me and make up a story, instead of starting with details that are real and I know of and going from there.

I never plan. I never know what the next page is going to be..... But that's the fun of writing a novel or a story, because I don't know what's going to happen next.

Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.

Sometimes I write music, sometimes I don't. I think I'm just writing more what's close to my heart, and musical stuff is close to my heart, and it's fun to write, and when something's fun to write you don't think about what statement you're trying to make or what genre you're trying to hone in on.

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.

I don't go into any album with a concept or a deliberate direction. It's more letting the best music that really appeals to me at the time, the best songs that I find after many months and years of search and sifting through my collection, and asking radio people and journalists. It's really an ongoing search that's as much daunting as it is somewhat exciting.

The longer I've been writing scripts, the more I find that you have to give the artist more leeway or else you'll just be disappointed. You can't force them to draw every image that's in your head. Since I'm a horrific artist, I wouldn't want them to anyway. So I definitely give them a lot more leeway now than I did at the beginning.

Perhaps whatever there is in my work that may be really interesting to others and surely what is interesting to me, is the result of a sometimes successful effort to free myself from any idea that what I produce must be art.

We didn’t want to disrupt the creative process. We have the chance to make the films we want because the films are not expensive. It’s very rare to be able to do that. It’s completely pure.